DWill wrote:Emerson had a brother named Buckley who was intellectually disabled. He lived in some kind of special facility which I don't believe was an institution such as we have today. Maybe it was more like a farm. Anyway, I read that Thoreau mentions in his journals going to visit Buckley, apparently a considerable walk that would not have phased HDT at all. Do you know anything about Buckley and HDT's relationship with him? I feel that HDT would have had strong feelings about the essential humanity of Buckley, similar perhaps to his feelings regarding the slaves whom he assisted.
Will, about Buckley, I posted to Waldenlist:
>"Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but
I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make
their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our
conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to
be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of
the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With
respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between
the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive,
simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as
fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep
cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to
live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth,
quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called
humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were his words.
The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for
him as for another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my
childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am
weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he
was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to
me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such promising ground -- it was
so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true enough,
in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did
not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed
that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed
pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better
than the intercourse of sages"(6.15).
"Emerson had a brother named Buckley who was intellectually
disabled." Could one of Thoreau's simple-minded visitors have been
Buckley?IIRC correctly, Emerson's brother didn't live with him.
Robert Bulkely Emerson had since 1828 been taken care of at McLean's
Asylum in Charlestown, taken there by his physician and Waldo in a
carriage. The only contact I know of that Thoreau had with him, was that
when he died, it was left to Thoreau to arrange his funeral service.<
If you remember, would you say where in the Journal Thoreau mentions his visit to Buckley?
Tom